Hey folks and welcome to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast!

If this is the first time you’ve listened to this podcast and you have no clue what I’m talking about, you can go back and listen to previous episodes, and that’s got the content of everything that we teach in Builders Business Blackbelt, right from the start of the marketing and the mindset around it, all the way through to scaling your business without the stress.

But in this particular episode, it’s gonna be a little bit different to what you’re used to.

We won’t be doing that the Q&A and the idea of the week and that, but because we’ve got a floating light bulb and we’ll get a picture of that floating light bulb, while I’m talking about it, I wanted to draw your attention to what we’re going to be presenting to you today in this podcast as a really, really great idea.

And that is, one of the things we always talk about is when you’ve got an issue, when you wanna change, improve something about your business, the key question is not to ask how do I do it, but who can I find that can either do it for me or help me do it?

And in Builders Business Blackbelt, we’ve got, I guess, what we call friends of Blackbelt. And there are people that we are really confident with, comfortable with referring our Blackbelt members to speak to about helping them with various things.

So we’ve gotten an amazing guy in the UK, his name’s Andy Bryce. He helps our guys with all sorts of emotional challenges, with stress and anxiety and all of that. There’s a ton of that in the building industry.

In fact, we just did a two-day intensive, which is a two-day conference with all of our Builders Business Blackbelt members and we had a bunch of guest speakers just addressing that and it was super powerful, super useful, a heap of fun as well. We’ve also got ENC Gale. Again, he’s up in the Gold Coast, again, can help you with the whole mental game.

He was part of the program for the two-day intensive, and we’ve got a couple of profit first professionals that we’re hooked up with, one of which is gonna be speaking to you today.

And we’ve also got a lady by the name of Steph Campanella, who is helping us with the online presence of Builders Business Blackbelt and she also helps and specializes in trades people.

And I was talking to both of them individually over the last few weeks, and I thought we need to get together and we need to have a conversation because the main thing that Steph looks after and can help tradies with, and they focus on on trades based businesses, including builders obviously, about how to generate really high quality leads with all of your digital stuff, your website, and search engine optimization, all of that sort of stuff.

So a successful building business must have that. And we talked about a triangle and it’s like, that’s one of the sides of the triangle. The other side of a triangle is the pathway, which is something that we do.

And we do it exceptionally well and it eliminates tire-kickers and price shoppers and bargain hunters, and just all of those time-wasters and money wasters as well. And it’s super simple to implement, and it can make a world of difference. So you can generate great leads with the help of Steph.

You can manage those leads with the process that we teach in the Blueprint program, Blueprint to Blackbelt. And then that means that you will be making more money, but I’ve spoken to heaps of builders that make money, they just don’t keep it. They have a lot of money going through their fingers and managing all of that money can be incredibly stressful, but they don’t end up keeping any of it.

And that’s profit first comes in. So we’re an absolute proponent fan of profit first and Mike Michalowics. And in Australia, things need to be tweaked a little bit for that profit first system to work properly for a builder. And that’s where Katie comes in. So Katie is going to be speaking to you today as well.

So what we’re doing for this podcast is I’m going to play you the conversation that myself, Katie and Steph had about a week ago and help you to understand why this triangle is so important. And if you understand geometry, what’s gonna happen if just one of the sides of triangle is missing, the other two sides collapse.

Each of these three parts of the triangle are absolutely critical to a successful building business and we’re just gonna unpack how that all works and how it can benefit you. So I’m gonna hand over to myself and Steph and Katie, have a listen.

*Transcription of the show*

Speaking with Katie Crismale-Marshall and Steph Campanella.

And we have decided to get together to put some thoughts together for builders and trade based businesses about some fairly critical ideas on how to improve their business and help you to understand that the common and often costly mistakes that happen that are completely unnecessary in a trades based business.

So I’ll talk about what I do in just a little while, but I just want to introduce, firstly, Katie, tell us a little bit about yourself. I know that you’re a published author. You’ve written the “Profit First for Tradies”, which we give out to all of our member builders, and I absolutely love it.

– Yeah. So my name’s Katie Crismale-Marshall and as Mick said, I wrote “Profit First For Tradies” here. And I work specifically with trainees to help them, what I call become permanently profitable. So no matter what crisis is happening at any point in time that their business can weather that storm. And we do that in a and one of the main parts of that puzzle is by implementing profit first in their business.

– Yeah. And the cool thing, and I encourage everybody to get a copy of that book, the cool thing about it is because I didn’t know Katie a long while ago, I met Mike Michalowics, it’s her right “Profit First” first, became good mates with him and it just changed everything, “Profit First” changed everything for us and our members. But the biggest struggle that we had was massaging it and modifying it so it worked for a trade space business because it’s just in its pure form.

It doesn’t seem to work as well. So Katie has done an amazing job at modifying it and helping trade space businesses be able to enjoy the benefits of it. It’s fantastic. Steph Campanella, tell us about yourself. What do you do? How do you help the trades businesses?

– Hi, I’m Steph Campanella and we run Tradies Go, and we have a system that we implement so that we can fix the foundations. We can fix the positioning and the automation. So that means that the foundation is secure and solid and we can actually build off it power.

A builder might think of a foundation, we fixed the positioning, so obviously ranking, paid ranking, organic ranking, but then also automation so that once you do get those great positions in Google, you actually attract the best customers with bay pieces and calls to action and make sure that your website’s being held accountable and actually, keeping all those leads and keeping you organized. So it’s the triangle.

– Yeah. Absolutely. And that’s what we were talking about in our pre-conversations and I guess we’ll talk about that in a minute.

From what I do, for the people who don’t know me, we have an organization called Builders Business Blackbelt, specifically for custom home builders, and we just help them change their business so it gives them what they wanted when they started, which was sort of more financial freedom, more time freedom, enjoy themselves a whole lot more.

You speak to most builders, in fact, most trades people, pretty much anyone who started a business with that thought process, it very rarely comes to fruition. It’s never their life.

So we worked really hard to give our builders a lot more profit, a lot more freedom, a lot more fun and meaning, and we have a great time doing it. And as I said, use Katie’s “Profit First for Tradies” for our team, for our members, because it just makes such a difference.

And Steph also has started looking after our search engine optimization and the website, because we were in the bush somewhere, we were in the jungle, we were in the dark forest somewhere where we had a website, thought it was a pretty good website, but no one else could see it. So what we tend to do in this conversation is talk about the three major parts of a business.

And so I’m gonna hand it over to Stephanie in a sec, to talk about the three major things that she sees that can really harm a tradespace business’s ability to generate quality leads. If you can generate quality leads, it can eliminate a whole raft of other problems and sins in your business.

If you’re dealing with poor quality leads, with horrible people, people who don’t wanna pay, they want to bargain shop and tire kicking, all of that sort of stuff, they waste your time. So being able to attract quality leads is absolutely essential.

For my part, what I wanna share with you today is the qualification process. And if you haven’t got a good qualification process, you can get a good quality lead and you can miss out on converting that lead into a customer.

So you’ve got to have a good qualification process to eliminate the time-wasters, the tire kickers and educate customer into how to work with you, to get the absolute maximum value and the best quality experience.

And then of course, we want Katie to help us to understand if we’ve got great leads and we’ve got great customers and we’re making money, how to keep it, because it’s not my point if it’s getting in one hand and out the other, if it’s slipping through your fingers, you’re working really hard, you potentially got a great business, but you’ve just got to keep on that bike and keep pedaling and pedaling because you’re not building any sort of wealth in the background. You might be making it but you’re not keeping it.

So you want Katie to give us the secrets of those. And before we got on, we were kind of talking that these three things that are like a triangle and each of them are so important to hold the other part of the triangle in place. If one disappears out of the equation, the others collapse, and that’s how we see these things.

So we want to go through each of these things, identify what the major issues are, what the solutions are and then after that, you guys can reach out to any one of us to get some help.

So hope that makes sense, Steph, let’s start with you because at the start we’ve got to generate leads. What are the three main problems that you see with trades based businesses in lead generation?

– I mean the big three is visibility, like you either have no visibility and no one can see you online, so therefore you’re not gonna generate any work and it’s all gonna be word of mouth and you have no control over your lead gen, like you’re just waiting for someone else to just basically turn up in your business whereas if you’ve got visibility and you’ve got control, it’s kind of like having a tap that you can turn on and off, depending on how your foreseeable quote, you’re six months in advance in terms of projects that are all booked in, or actually do you have no idea what’s coming up?

So visibility is really important because it’s not just about being online and generating word of mouth. I mean, I always feel like when it’s just word of mouth leads, it’s kinda like, you’ve just got to take them because who knows when the next lead is coming and you have no control.

So the first thing is visibility and actually being seen online and being understood. Your website could have a mess of messages and there’s no clarity as to what even you do, just visibility in general, but it’s also, is your message is actually clear?

So visibility is really important. And we tend to do that with bait pieces and big calls to action and gosh, making sure that all the functions are all pushing someone to take action and lead them down a path that you want them to go to, not that we’ll just let them go. But the second big thing is that a lot of traders and builders spend a lot of time on social media in a time of need, they just post more content and just hope for the best.

And again, like there’s no process to that. You have no idea if it’s even working, you’re just kind of posting and you’re more busy so it feels like something’s going to happen. But again, if you actually focused on set you can drive more interest in and drive stronger lead gen. So that’s something that I see very often. The last one here too is emailing customers.

So if and you are not ranked yet, and you’re not willing to pay for pay per click, which is completely fine, no Google ads or no Facebook ads, then have you got an email database because of all our trades, when they come with us, there is like some mine new percentage that is actually doing email marketing.

And I mean, email is gold. I think it’s like the oldest trick in the book, but no one does it ’cause I think there’s all these new social media things, that’s what is working, it’s like, no, the best marketing tools are the ones that you actually use. So yeah, I can’t stress the email, is the most undervalued tool in the marketing space there.

So yeah, that’s kind of my three and every call that I have with a client, it’s like, we’re doing the work, but is it profitable? And there’s Katie there that can help with understanding if you’re actually pricing correctly.

And then, we send all these leads and then the customer won’t not be answering the phone properly. And it’s an onboarding and sales conversation and where Mick comes in, so we’re kinda like the partners, I guess you could say, you kind of need all three to do it properly, because I think Mick could put this together perfectly.

You can have great finance and a great sales system, but you’ve got no leads or you can have great lead gen and your pricing is great, but you don’t know how to talk to a customer. And yeah, so really good sort of little triangle thoughts we’ve got here.

– Yep. We’ve got to have all three. I mean, it’s just the way the structure works. And to me, it’s like to bore down into a little bit more depth about what you just talked about. I think what you’ll see is many trades based businesses do random acts of marketing rather than it being structured. So there are all of these things links to the chain, but none of them are connected together.

So in and of themselves, they’re probably good marketing pieces, but they don’t lead anyway anywhere because the chain is broken. So it’s great to have someone like Steph to look after that. Also, I think what you’re saying with that email databases is many businesses tend to have their database on a social platform.

So they got all the people on their Facebook page, liking them or in a Facebook group, as a member of whatever, Facebook change the rules quite quickly, if you hadn’t noticed, anything could happen at any tick of the clock, you’ve got to have your people in your database so no matter what the flavor of the month with the social platforms is, you still got contact and you can go, Hey, let’s jump over onto this other platform now and that sort of stuff.

So great things to watch out for from Stephan, and while you’re listening to this video, I think of for yourself as to what, if any of those things, are you doing correctly or not? And do you wanna reach out to get some help with that now?

I’ve been in and around marketing for a long time, and I had to engage Steph to help me get my shit together, the honors of tradespace business, you’ve already got a bloody job. You don’t need another one and you haven’t got the time.

All the bandwidth, you know, I consider myself fairly tech savvy, but when it comes to the changing landscape of Facebook and search engine optimization and Google, and what have you, it’s a full-time job. You’ve got to engage somebody who knows your industry and can help look after you.

So that’s Steph, she’s helping you with that front end, how to become visible and how to attract the right type of people for your business. Once the lead has been attracted, one of the things that I do is for our guys, is we create what’s called the quality client pathway to a qualified process.

And its primary function is to educate the customer on how to work with you, how to behave, to get the best possible outcome for themselves as far as quality, value and for the- well, the quality of the experience and the value for their investment.

And the mistakes that I see builders and other trade-based businesses, because we got some electricians and we even got a building designer and shed builder and a few things outside building in the membership, so we get to look peer inside their businesses as well.

So that the common mistakes generally are somebody who calls up on the phone or sends an email message in, they are instantly seen as an opportunity as a lead.

And off we go, we jump on the phone and we’ll go out to see the site and we’ll gather all of the information and in some cases spend 30, 40, 50 hours putting together a quote for a customer who had no intention of giving you the job, because they’ve already got a builder and they’ve just pretended to be a lead for you so they could get you to go and basically price check the quote that they’ve already got.

It just grinds my gears that the people out there think that little of trades and builders, that they ask them to put hours and hours and hours, not only their time, but their expertise, their experience, their knowledge into something and expect to pay absolutely nothing for it. So in Builders Business Blackbelt, free quotes are outlawed. We just do not allow our members to do it.

They get paid for their proposals. And there is a process that you need to learn to be able to position yourself to get paid for your proposals. And every single builder who’s done it wonders why they didn’t ever do it before and will never go back. But the key to this folks is that you’ve got to flip the script.

And this is the sort of thing that we teach our guys is instead of you being up on stage, juggling the balls and eating fire, and the customer is down behind the judge’s bench there, they’re sitting there with their hands on the bench saying, well, show us what you’ve got.

And you’re juggling and doing all of this sort of thing. And then they’ll go, maybe we’ll put you through to the next round, or maybe not. We’ve got to flip that script.

You put your prospects up on the stage and you ask them, show me what you’ve got. And because it’s your business, you can decide whether you’re going to let them into your business if they’re appropriate to work with or not.

There’s a couple of things you need to do. So some of the mistake people make is anybody who could fog up a mirror is a prospect. Well, no, they’re not. Just because their breathing isn’t qualification enough. You need to make sure that they’re in the right place in the process.

They are the right type of person for you. And so we create this qualified process that has a series of ever increasing hurdles, behavioral hurdles, we call them, to get your prospect and the hurdles of design.

So the type of person for you will have no problem stepping over that hurdle. They will perform the action that you’ve asked them to perform, and they go to the next step. And then there’s a slightly higher hurdle, and that goes three or four times before you open the door to your business.

The people who aren’t appropriate for your business, they will be like the horse that runs up to the jump and it stops. And they won’t go any further which is fantastic for you because you don’t have to say no for a start and they have behaved their way out of your process.

So it saves you a whole lot of time plus you don’t end up with a nightmare client and anyone who’s been in the trades-based businesses for any more than five minutes will have had a nightmare client, thought it was a good idea at the time and wished they’d never laid eyes on them. And so this process can eliminate all of those people and even get an seemingly average prospect to turn into a really, really high quality customer for you for your business. So we’ve got Steph to create the lead.

They come knocking on the door, through the email, on the phone, into the office, however they do it, and then we put them through this process, so they become a good quality customer. We do the build for them. They pay us and guess what? We’ve got some profit left over.

This is when we hand pass everything Katie, because, and I don’t wanna steal your thunder at all, Katie, but I just quickly want to say, because coming from a place where I was a business coach, and before we were called Builders Business Blackbelt, we were called Uncover Hidden Profits.com. That was the name of the business. And we used to have a podcast and all of that sort of stuff.

So I had a big backdrop with Uncover Hidden Profits in two foot high letters on the wall and it was just near my desk. And it was the weekend that I was reading Mike Michalowics’s, “Profit First”. I’d been in business for about 18 or 20 years at that stage. And I read “Profit First” and I looked up at the wall and it turns out I didn’t even know what a profit was.

I felt sick to the point where I thought I was going to lose my lunch, like I was so disgusted in what I had done in the last 18 to 20 years with our financial decisions. Fortunately, I went pretty quick from disgust to excitement once I started to understand there was a pathway forward and we started to implement it straight away, and it has changed everything.

I can’t tell you, and I don’t want to tell you, cause it sounds like it’d be boasting, if I said, this is where we were, this is where we are now. You’d get sort of slashed down with the old, tall poppy syndrome thing, but I can’t recommend to anyone “Profit First”.

I can’t recommend it enough, and particularly with Katie, because that’s been the biggest challenge we’ve had is massaging and modifying “Profit First” so it works for a trade-based business.

So let’s hear from Katie, please tell us what are the mistakes that you see trades based businesses make that keeps them poor?

– And that’s a good point about having those consistent numbers coming in with your referrals, being paid to get the right client so that you do make money because one of the things I see is people, the tradies think if they just get another job, if they just get a bigger job, the profit side of things will take care of themselves and they won’t.

And like we said, coming back to that triangle, if you don’t get all three sides right, it’s not going to work. So I always explain profit first in the way of, we don’t go to site and build a house unless we’ve got a plan.

We don’t go and do a Reno unless we have a plan and we all know it is doing which part and at which time, and what I think as business owners, what has failed to be taught to us is a plan to manage our money and that’s exactly what “Profit First” is. It’s just a framework that we use to manage our money properly, to pay ourselves first and to pay ourself a profit.

And the things I see happen, time and time again, and everybody thinks that they’re the only one, they think that everybody else is doing amazing, they see everybody else, their mates with the cars and the boats and the boats and the bikes and so on and they think, oh, there’s a lot of shame, I guess, around thinking that they’re not doing as well as the next person, I have had the fortune to look into hundreds of traits businesses. And majority of them are suffering the same as everybody else.

They just look like they’ve got it on but like you, you think you’re at a certain spot and then all sudden one day you actually like, no, no, it’s not right, I’m not making any profit. So the three things I see-

– Can you just site what profit is first, and the reason I want you to explain that is because I didn’t know what it was and I thought I was reasonably intelligent, but still didn’t understand what real profit was.

And the reason I want you to share that is because through Builders Business Blackbelt, when we get a new member on, we put them through a profit first financial health check. And the shocking, shocking result of that is we’ve been doing this for a long time now, we have not had one builder go through that financial health check, not one of has been profitable, and I mean, not $1 of profit.

They thought they had profit because the profit and loss sheet said they had profit but when you read profit first and measure it that way, none of them were profitable. And that’s what at least one of the big reasons why we go into business. So explain profit.

– So as Mick was just saying, so there’s profit from an accounting perspective on your profit and loss, and when the accountant gives you those at the end of the year, when he tells you you’ve made a profit, that’s a paper profit, everybody’s first thought, shit, where is that money ’cause it’s not in the account.

And then they continue on doing the same thing year in and year out and they’ve still got no money left over. When we talk about profit first and profit from that perspective, we’re talking about setting a specific amount aside for your profit as your reward for being the business owner and taking all the risks that there are to be the business owner, which is different to our wages.

Our wages is our wages for the job we do in the business. You might be onsite, you might be in the office, whatever that may be. So we have to make sure that we set a specific amount aside for profit first. What the formula is from an accounting perspective is sales minus expenses equals profit.

So it’s a leftover afterthought. What profit first does, it says, sales minus profit equals expenses. And just that small shift means that we are putting our focus and our importance on actually planning for a profit in our business rather than seeing what we’ve got left over at the end. Because when we see what we’ve got left over at the end, we are not profitable.

– The hope strategy.

– Yeah.

– I hope something’s left.

– It’ll be different next year and the next year rolls around. It’ll be different next year, here’s some tip, it’s not.

– .

– Yes, yes. And so the reason why it’s not different is because businesses don’t prepare their business to be profitable. I often hear, I wasn’t very good at Maths, it’s not my thing, my bookkeeper takes care of that.

I’m a bit behind, these reasons, as the business owner, we need to take responsibility for every part of our business. It doesn’t mean that we have to do every step in our business. And what I find particularly when it comes to the numbers is that we don’t put it first, we put it last- we put it last and then it doesn’t happen.

So we need to make sure that we have our bookkeeping under control, that we are using, I only carry my bookkeeping or with my bookkeeping clients, so whichever system is fine, but that you are using zero to its most efficient way.

There is a gain when we take on new bookkeeping clients, we do a full review of their zero and I’m yet to have a zero file where we haven’t been able to implement so many different automations and efficiencies that makes such a difference in their business because we know the numbers are right. So we have to prepare for that.

We can, again, just hope that our accountants are gonna do our book keeping every quarter or that the bookkeeper’s gonna keep it up to date or that the whoever’s job it is, it’s just gonna happen.

We need to make sure that we plan to put checks in place to make sure that those things happen. The second thing we need to do, we need to plan for our profit. So we need to know what our goals are, how are we gonna get those goals?

So like Steph was saying, what a math is great, but we can’t plan for that. And if you can’t plan the leads coming in, it makes it really difficult to plan for your profit because it’s gonna be lumpy, it’s gonna be up and down and you’re going to not stick to the plan because you haven’t started at step one and got those consistencies in there.

So you have to plan for your profit, with things like your marketing, with things like your proposals, you have to get those things in place. And then the final thing we do is we actually have to make and take our profit.

What profit first will do in your business, it will show you very quickly, in most instances that you are not profitable, and I don’t want to show you where, and for many people that is not fun and not super exciting because many of them have been in business for so long and they’ve managed to get by and they’ve managed to get by and they’re managed to get by, but they’re actually not profitable.

And by following the profit first framework, it makes it really easy to see which areas of your business you need help in first, so that you have a plan rather than going in. I’m gonna go over here and fix, my sales problem. Oh hang on, no, it’s a marketing problem.

Oh hang on, no, it’s a this problem. Profit first we’ll show you exactly where the problem is. And then you can go in and fix that problem or have that specialist fix that problem for you so then, you are consistently and permanently profitable.

– Yeah. I think one of the important things that you’ve just mentioned right there at the end was you might know what you need to fix and then you sort of said, you could fix it or you could get expert to go fix it. We all have been coached at some level by Taki Moore. He’s my business coach, I know he’s yours, Katie, Steph knows Taki as well. Business coaches need coaches as well. And-

– And just on that as well, I think people forget that, and I tell clients all the time, I have a business coach, I’m part of Taki’s group. I also have a profit first mentor. So I teach this to people all day, every day, but I still have a profit first mentor who helps me keep on track because it’s the accountability, it’s the focus that we all need no matter what level and that surprises people, but it’s vital to our businesses.

– I think the important point to take away from that as well is Taki always teaches us to ask who not how, because how do I fix the problem? Well, you’ve got to learn how to fix the problem and you normally have to pay to be taught or pay for a bit of software or do- you’ve got to pay to fix the problem and it takes your time and your mental energy and all of that sort of stuff, asking who instead of how is, you have to pay, yeah.

But it’s significantly cheaper because it doesn’t take your time, it doesn’t take your bandwidth. They’ll do a million times better job than you ever would because you’re a builder or a Sparky or a plumber or some other trades, and you’re not built to do that stuff.

So always ask who not how. To that point, what I’d love to do is sort of go around the circle again and ask Steph, what’s the first step that somebody needs to take to get a hold of you? What’s the go like, they reach out to you and how do they do that, and once they do, what are the steps that happened for them after that?

– Yeah, sure. So, I mean, so tradiesgo.com.au-

– And I’ll put all the details at the end of the video as well. So once this video is finished, I’ll put it all up on the screen. So you’ll have Steph’s, Katie’s and myself’s, websites, contact information, away you go.

– Mick is so smooth I tell ya. So tradiesgo.com.au, there’s an apply for a call section there where you can go to the accelerate page, accelerate system page, and read about our program and how it works and success stories and all that sort of stuff. And are you the right fit?

So there’ll be a form that you need to fill out that tells us a little bit about your business and at what level you’re at, because we aren’t for everyone, and I’m completely upfront with that. We can’t solve everyone’s problem depending on where you’re at in your business.

So the best thing to do is to obviously apply for a call, we’ll go over a 45-minute game plan call, and just go through everything that’s going on with the business and where you’re at, what you’ve done before, what you’ve tried and I can sort of, I won’t diagnose, but I can see where you’re at and if your core problem is what we solve, and if it is what we solve, then we can offer you a spot in our program.

And again, because we can’t take too many trades or builders on in any one area, because that would just be like mount malpractice, like, how can we take five plumbers on that are all Sydney plumber, I mean, we would know everyone’s secrets and be working bids against each other. So that would just be stupid.

So we choose, I guess, the cream of the crop or the best client for us to work with that we can actually make an impact with. And then off we go, we get into the whole getting started and taking over and all that sort of stuff. There’s always lots of amazing stories that happen when that happens. So that’s kind of our on-ramp I guess you could say.

– Yeah. Perfect. And just to add to that, if you’re thinking, oh, maybe I don’t need that sort of stuff. You’d be really wrong. You’d be very, very mistaken, I know that because I thought that, and I thought for a long time, and I missed out on so much opportunity because of it. And you just need to be visible.

You need to have a website that can be found, and there needs to be a pathway when somebody reaches your website, there needs to be a logical lubricated, no friction pathway to your business. And good luck trying to do that by yourself. Cause I said, I’m fairly good with the tech and I’ve failed dismally over the last-

– There’s too many moving parts, Mick and this is the thing, you might get a marketing theme and they’ll just do that one beat.

They’ll just do pay per click and they won’t fix the website or they’ll just do optimization and they won’t fix anything. Like we just can’t do it like that. We do it the whole thing all at once, because we just want it done properly, like, yeah, whole enchilada.

– Yeah. Fantastic. As far as we’re concerned, you can reach out to us at BuildersBusinessBlackbelt.com.au, there’s a call button there.

Just like Steph said, we’re not for everyone. It all depends where you are in your building journey. I suggest that where aware best place to help with builders who are established. So you’ve already got somewhat of a team, two, three, four for people in your team member you’ve been around.

You’ve experienced the majority of problems in the building industry. We basically just jump on a call, like it’s pretty much as simple as that. We learn a little bit about where you are, where do you want to go? You learn all about how we do things. If that works, we’ll talk about what the next step is. If it’s not gonna work, well, at least you know it’s not gonna work, no harm, no foul, but let’s at least have a conversation.

And let us point you towards the resources that can make a difference, so even if it’s not working with us, there are a gazillion things we can still help you with and put you in the right direction towards those resources. So that’s how we do it. Katie, do we just drop Randy your house, what’s the story with you?

– No, you can’t do that.

– If you like, Mick, it to be a bit of a trouble for you.

– No, you not. So my website profitfirstfortradies.com.au or you can go there, you can purchase a copy of my book is a good place to start. It’s available on audio as well, if you prefer to listen. I wrote it specifically for tradies so it is short, sharp, to the point.

I’ve had, I’ve lost count of how many emails I’ve had from tradies who have said, I haven’t picked up a book since like primary school and I was able to read it. So that’s a good start because again, likely others have said, we’re not for everybody. And we do take a specific type of client on.

So obviously the tradespace is where we work, but you need to be ready and willing and open to do something differently because what you’ve been doing is not working. And we only work with those who are ready to jump in and give profit first try full on.

We don’t work with anyone who’s just going to do this or just going to do this part of it, all in or as Mick said, there’s plenty of other people and other resources I can share and refer you on to because we choose to work with those who already to make a difference. You don’t have to know how to do everything, you just have to have the right attitude for us.

– Yeah. And I can add a white to what Katie just said there, because before we met Katie, I’d been doing my best to teach profit first in a fairly poor way. And the one thing that I know for sure and certain is you either implement profit first 100% or don’t bother, like 99% just won’t cut it. It’s got to be all or nothing.

And that doesn’t mean that it’s hard, when you implement it, it starts to get easier. A raft of other problems disappear, just being able to pay the best when it comes up is just one. People go, “Whoa, I’ve never felt so good. I’ve got the money to pay the best.” That’s like, really? That’s your highlight.

Anyway, it’s been terrific talking to you. I hope this has made sense to the viewer, that all of all of these three things are essential to be successful in your business. And you may already have one or two of those areas that are successful in your business, but your business overall, isn’t working the way you want.

So who out of the three parts of the triangle here, do you need to talk to? If you need to talk to all three of us, not sure how that would work, but reach out, reach out, do it in alphabetical order or something, select Katie first. But we’re all here to help. We all support each other.

We’re all trying to help tradespace businesses achieve the same thing, which is to be able to, what’s that the triangle, thought you were doing this to me, that you’re sending me love hearts.

– That’s the triangle.

– But anyway once we’re finished yabbering, it’ll come up on the screen, all of our contact details, and you’ll be able to reach out to any of us, all of us, ask us questions. We are here to help. I hope this made sense.

I hope you can see the value in making sure that these three pillars in your business are as solid as you can make them, all the rest is kind of refinement and sexy Nesbit. You’ve got to have these three pillars built in a solid fashion in the first place. And I’ve just realized folks, what we probably should have done is had this video sponsored by Specsavers. I just realized- So maybe we’ll see if we can put an ad afterwards.

– You can still make that call.

– So thank you, Katie, thank you, Steph. I’m Mick Hawes. It’s been great to be talking to the viewer, the listener real soon.

Takeaway & Jump On A Call

So folks, I hope that made sense. Right at the end there, we were talking about who should we call first if you need all three.

So if you’ve got a qualification process in place and you’ve got good leads, you need to speak to Katie first. If you’ve got good leads and a good qualification, now what am I saying? Well, you know what I mean, whichever one is missing, go talk to that person.

But I thought I’d just quickly address the, if you need to speak to all three of us, so if you’re still really struggling financially in managing your cashflow, if you don’t have good quality leads coming in, and if you’ve still got lots of time-wasters and there’s a bunch of stress around being dicked around by people who are just bagging hunters and things like that, my suggestion is that you start with the quality client pathway, and I know that I’m telling you this, and I’m saying you need to us first, but that’s what makes sense completely to me.

Because if you invest time and money in leads, in generating leads before you have a quality client pathway, you will potentially burn those leads. You’ll be wasting that money.

And so what I would suggest to you is even if you’ve got a trickle of leads, that aren’t all of that good quality, I suggest you implement the quality client pathway first, and you will be able to, without any expenditure of money for leads and what have you be able to save a bunch of time and get better quality clients into your business first.

When those better quality clients come into your business, you will be able to then set up profit first. I mean, I’d be setting that up anyway, but you’ll have cash to put into it. And obviously when you’ve got that set up, you need to then expand on it.

So get more high quality leads, which takes the pressure off your quality client pathway, because you you’re putting good stuff into it. And so I hope that helps decide where you need to go first. And we’d love to talk to you.

So, I haven’t had the opportunity in this podcast to say, if you have been watching live, I’d love for you to put hashtag live, now somebody has already done that. And it looks like Steven O’Keeffe has been watching live.

He’s put a comment in the Facebook group that says biggest game changer for our business. Absolutely. It’s just the difference between having profit first and not is amazing. Having the confidence, because you’re getting good quality leads is amazing.

And having the ability to eliminate time-wasters, tire kickers, price shoppers, time thieves is amazing as well because it makes you more profitable. It gives you back more time.

It gives you more enjoyment because you’re getting rid of the people that you shouldn’t be anywhere near your business before they steal your time.

We’d love to help you implement any of those things, get you started with any of those things. It just begins with a conversation. And so all you need to do is jump on the website, if you like, go to BuildersBusinessBlackbelt.com.au, schedule a call.

As I said, it’s just a real short call to find out where you are, what’s in your way, where you’d like to go and let’s see if we can point you in the right direction and give you the resources that you need to start to get traction as soon as humanly possible. If you’re watching this on Facebook, I’ve put a link in the comment section, you can just click that and that will go take you through the process.

Fill out a little form, tell us a little bit about yourself and schedule a call. Same thing if you’re on YouTube, there’s a link in the description there, can just click that and away we go. But we’d love to be talking to you. It costs you nothing to have the conversation.

It might be the best conversation you’ve ever had for your business, because it will save you a ton of time, a ton of frustration and angst trying to figure things out because pretty much any problem that has been experienced in the building industry has been experienced by a Builders Business Blackbelt member. We’ve talked about it, we’ve I identified a fix for it, a solution for it.

We’ve applied that solution in the real world. We’ve gotten feedback from the builders as to how that worked or didn’t and refined it. So we do have the solution for pretty much any problem that you’ve got in your building business. It’s just a matter of having a conversation to find out where you’d like to start and if we’re the right fit.

So I hope that makes sense. We’ll be back again. I know this was a longer episode because of the video but that’s cool. I hope it was valuable, tt was action packed, it had a lot of great information. Reach out to Katie, reach out to Steph, reach out to us.

Let us help you build your building business. We’ll be back again with another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast next Tuesday, 10:00 AM, Eastern standard time, whatever it is, Sydney time, let’s call it.

I’m Mick Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. I hope you enjoyed it. That’s it. Bye for now.